The program is out!

The big day has finally arrived. The entire program for this year’s Films from the South festival has been released and tickets are up for sale!

Av Red.
31. okt 2017

We’ve been searching, viewing and working around the clock to get our hands on the best films from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the end, we’ve chosen 82 films from 37 countries that will be presented over the course of 11 festival days.

Main competition14 films are competing for the main prize, the Silver Mirror, and are the cherry on top of this year’s program. Films from the South’s opening film, A Fantastic Womanby Sebastián Lelio, is Chile’s candidate for the Academy Awards, and has become a festival favorite.

In Killing Jesus, Colombian director Laura Mora gives us a brutal story based on her own life. Master director Hirokazu Koreeda shifts gears from family drama to murder mystery in his new film The Third Murder. In Neruda, director Pablo Larraín and superstar Gael Garcia Bernal team up to tell the story of Chile’s national poet Pablo Neruda.

Guests This year, the festival’s directorial portraits present two male and two female directors who all have films in the main competition. Wajib, by Palestinian Annemarie Jacir, is a strong and plainspoken family drama about Palestinians in modern day Israel. Anahí Berneri’s Alanissolidifies Berneri’s standing as one of Latin America’s most prominent and radical filmmakers. Award-winning filmmaker Diego Lerman’s A Sort of Family exposes a corrupt and morally dubious system in Buenos Aires, and A Man of Integrity by Mohammad Rasoulof from Iran, depicts individual destinies under a totalitarian regime. The latter won the main prize in the Un Certain Regard category during this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Doc:Sør Ten titles are competing for the documentary prize in Doc:Sør. Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is an epic documentation of the massive refugee crisis. The Grown-Ups by Maite Alberd is a charming story from a Chilean school for people with Down’s syndrome. The artistically ambitious Caniba, directed by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, brings audiences up close and personal with cannibal Issei Sagawa. In Jaha’s Promisewe follow the story of a woman’s fight against horrifying traditions, from directors Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan.

Thrills & Chills: vampires and revenge-actionSeveral countries in the South are known for strong genre-films, and this year we’re dedicating a category of its own to these films, called Thrills & Chills. Expect horror films from Mexico, revenge-action from South Korea, untraditional werewolf film from Brazil, reckless vampire-tales from Japan, body-horror from Vietnam and much more!

Read more about the exclusive screening of Tokyo Vampire Hotel in Kulturkirken Jakob here.

Barnas Sørfilm and MangapolisBring the kids along to this year’s festival! The category Barnas Sørfilm is ripe with quality films for children (and adults) of all ages. We’ll be showing, among others, the anime version of one of Scandinavia’s finest tales, Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter, and nature-documentary Born in China,which will be made available to the youngest audience members through live-dubbing in Norwegian. Adult anime-fans can also enjoy the Japanese fairytale Ancien and the Magic Tabletand Chinese Have a Nice Day.

Film and debateThe Critical Room is the festival’s arena for film and debate. In An Insignificant Man we meet Indian politics’ new wonder-boy, Arvind Kejriwal, who shook New Delhi in 2015 with his newly founded grass-roots party. Filmmaker Feras Fayyad directs the lens towards the senselessness of war in his much-discussed film Last Men in Aleppo. Joakim Demmer takes a closer look at the phenomenon of “land grabbing” in Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas, a practice where multinational companies buy up agricultural areas in impoverished nations. In When the Guns Go Silent director Natalia Orozco examines the process behind the peace negotiation that recently warded off civil war in Colombia. And in the documentary The Apology by Tiffany Hsiung the spotlight is aimed at sexual violence in war.

Focus countries: Nigeria (”Nollywood”) and ColombiaNigeria’s film industry, nicknamed “Nollywood”, has over the last few decades become the second largest in the world in production volume – right behind Bollywood. At most 50 new films are being made each week, 2500 films each year, and it’s estimated that the industry contributes with over 600 billion dollars to the country’s GDP and employs over 1 million people.

We’re bringing you five samples of what Nollywood has to offer during this year’s festival.

In a little over a decade Colombia has increased their feature film production exponentially and become one of the most exciting film countries in South America. During this year’s Films from the South, audiences can enjoy a revenge-thriller from Medellin, a bittersweet drama from Bogota, a road movie comedy from Colombia’s coast and an action film from the depths of the Amazon jungle. Worthy of mention is Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza’s romantic drama Candelaria, which won the Venice Days Award during the Venice Film Festival this year and is supported by Sørfond.

You can find a general outline of what will be shown during the festival on our program page. Click on each film to read more about it and find out when and where it will be screened. Tickets can be bought directly through our site and through Nordisk Film Kino’s and Cinemateket’s web pages.

We can’t wait to welcome you to this year’s Films from the South festival Nov. 9. – 19.!